It's been a year and a half since Rock Your Phone first made live their Rock.app store for 3rd party iPhone apps. Over the past few months, the folks who own both stores (Jay Freeman and Mario Ciabarra) have been working through a huge deal, which has come to public fruition tonight - Cydia is acquiring Rock. Well, technically, SaurikIT, LLC is acquiring Rock Your Phone, Inc (let's use correct business names here).

Details of the acquisition have not been made public, but here's what it means to you: Rock.app will essentially dwindle away. There will be a transitional period for the next 10 days where users can purchase/download apps and licenses in Rock. After that, users will use their Cydia Store login to retrieve their purchased apps. The large majority of themes/apps from Rock will be moved over to Cydia (most are already there right now). Rock will have a notice on it's first page, and APT updates will discontinue in the near future (so Rock would be useless even if you had it). I chatted with Mario Ciabarra (CEO and founder of Rock Your Phone) and he had this to say about the acquisition:

It's been a fun ride. We set out to change the landscape and I think we were very successful. I think we contributed to attracting more business professionals to the iPhone jailbreak community, and added some great functionality to the platform. The current transaction with Cydia is a great opportunity for us. We're going to miss some of the excitement, but no reason for anyone to worry. I, personally, will be spending even more time in Intelliborn apps development (both existing and exciting new projects). A few months ago, Jay and I sat down together and we realized, I enjoyed making apps more (and was better at it), while Jay enjoys providing platform functionality. It was a win-win for both groups and we're excited about the transition.

Ciabarra, aka psuskeels, has been making jailbreak apps since very early on in the scene (Intelliscreen came out in May of 2008) - just a couple months after Cydia's February 2008 release. And while Intelliborn will still be a big player in the iPhone 3rd party apps scene, Rock will not. All the Intelliborn apps, like MyWi, Tlert, MyProfiles, My3G, Intelliscreen, etc will all remain available and development will be continued on them. They will all be available solely in Cydia now. In fact, this move means a total of over 21,000 iPhone extensions, apps, and themes are now in Cydia which are not available in the Apple AppStore.

There's been a fierce undercurrent in many communities this past 18 months of "loyalty" to one of the two major jailbreak AppStores, with conversations in high gear lauding one or the other, bringing up this point or that point, etc. Many had both installed, and everyone had a preference. One thing can be said - it was a good run. You can't argue that Cydia isn't a more technically thorough solution, but the user experience of Rock.app was preferred by many. And the numbers are impressive - check these out from the Rock Your Phone news post about the acquisition:

Number of Developers with apps listed in the Rock Store: 124 (from 19 countries)

Unique iOS devices that installed Rock: 4.6 million (from 220 countries/territories) - Wow that is a lot of places!

Registered Rock Users: 2+ million

Number of App licenses sold: 500,000

Users of who took the plunge and bought something: 280,000 (from 185 countries)

Number of Rock Employees (we are using the word employee loosely here but, hey, it is our company): 9

After jailbreaking was officially declared legal in late July, there's been an even larger focus on the jailbreak community, or 3rd party iPhone developers. This acquisition makes Cydia and Cydia Store the clear leader in iPhone 3rd party package management. Exciting times ahead...

I don't use Rock, but this is kind of disappointing. Competition is a good thing, and saurik hasn't exactly been speedy with the updates lately as it is. We still don't even have a Cydia icon that's made for the retina display...

Wait WTF! Does this mean I have to go back to slow *** Cydia on my slow *** iPhone 3G?! I mean if I had a 3GS or a 4 it would be faster but on my 3G it is so slow and I love rock's interface! Please tell me cydia will turn into a rock like app cuz I'll just throw my iPhone 3G out lol.

I don't use Rock, but this is kind of disappointing. Competition is a good thing, and saurik hasn't exactly been speedy with the updates lately as it is. We still don't even have a Cydia icon that's made for the retina display...

Actually, the Cydia bootstrap that came with the iPhone 4 jailbreak contained an iPhone 4 Retina icon. Here is a screenshot from the the day jailbreak launched:

If you do not have that icon it is bceause comex's jailbreak got broken at some point and he stopped installing it. This will be fixed in the next Cydia update (I've been avoiding updates to the ecosystem while we finish working out this merging of interests, so chpwn has had time to start helping with the Cydia codebase, which is awesome).

Originally Posted by J Sweeney

Will Cydia have features that Rock had such as backups, really fast loading and a better UI

Rock's backup feature will be coming to Cydia. Rock only had faster loading because it did not honor APT correctly, so there were numerous buggy situations where you got screwed: there was even a recent time when Rock was screwing up an installation so core that everyone had to restore... Rock's speed was just because it was sloppy.

If you do not have that icon it is bceause comex's jailbreak got broken at some point and he stopped installing it. This will be fixed in the next Cydia update (I've been avoiding updates to the ecosystem while we finish working out this merging of interests, so chpwn has had time to start helping with the Cydia codebase, which is awesome).

I stand corrected

Don't get me wrong, I use Debian systems all the time for work and have great respect for what you've done with Cydia. Congrats on making it into something so ubiquitous and profitable.

Damn. Cydia's interface sucks. Cydia's web browser interface sucks even worse. Rock had fewer apps but the interface was much nicer without the onslaught and slowass ads that Cydia pummels people with. Rock also had reviews. Cydia is also much slower in approving apps. Unless Cydia "rockifies" their interface, this is a step backwards.

If you do not have that icon it is bceause comex's jailbreak got broken at some point and he stopped installing it. This will be fixed in the next Cydia update (I've been avoiding updates to the ecosystem while we finish working out this merging of interests, so chpwn has had time to start helping with the Cydia codebase, which is awesome).

Rock's backup feature will be coming to Cydia. Rock only had faster loading because it did not honor APT correctly, so there were numerous buggy situations where you got screwed: there was even a recent time when Rock was screwing up an installation so core that everyone had to restore... Rock's speed was just because it was sloppy.

Nice, took him less than 10 minutes to respond to you specifically, what are you complaining about.